Column: ‘Educational excellence is about more than money. But solid funding is the only foundation that will get us there.’

That was a nice welcome-aboard gift for new Cumberland County Schools superintendent Eric Bracy — as good as any superintendent has gotten for a long, long time. Bucking a long, parsimonious tradition, the county commissioners didn’t cut a cent out of the school system’s annual budget request.

They broke open the piggy bank and gave the schools $103 million in operating funds, $300 million for school maintenance and $160 million toward future school construction. That’s a great place to begin for a superintendent who comes to town with a long track record of making school systems better — a lot better — than they were before he arrived. 

Good thing, because Bracy’s going to need all the help he can get.

State and federal funding are a big part of the school system’s revenue pie. The biggest slice is the state’s, which sends the lion’s share of Cumberland’s $673 million school budget. That sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But by most comparisons — with many other counties, with other states, even with many other countries — it’s a worrisome shortchanging of our kids’ futures. 

Here’s the problem: North Carolina isn’t serious about funding public education. The nonprofit Education Law Center ranks us 48th in the nation for our K-12 public-school support. View it as a percentage of our state’s gross domestic product, we’re at 49th. Our state economy may be booming and our leaders are announcing massive new projects many times a year, but little of that new tax revenue is targeted to education, despite the clear and obvious need to create a highly educated workforce that’s ready for all those new jobs.

That’s not just hurting our kids. It’s also violating the North Carolina Constitution, which says, “The General Assembly shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of free public schools, which shall be maintained at least nine months in every year, and wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students.” But because the constitution also allows counties to supplement their state funding, all schools are decidedly not created equal. The annual state “report cards” on school systems’ achievement make it plain — we’ve got some haves and a lot of have-nots. 

Cumberland County has long lived among the have-nots with our local school funding, at last measure, coming in 74th among the state’s 100 counties. It gets worse around us: Robeson County’s local funding is 99th. Hoke’s is 100th. Dead last. 

Cumberland, Robeson and Hoke were three of the counties in a class-action suit that was called the “Leandro case” for its lead plaintiff, a student in the Hoke system. That student is middle-aged now, more than 30 years after a judge ruled on the suit — and then was ignored by the General Assembly, year after year. (No political finger-pointing allowed here, my partisan friends — the Democrats ignored the Leandro orders to improve school funding for years before the Republicans took over and followed the same course.)

The General Assembly lately has indeed bumped up some school funding, but it’s doing it through the “opportunity scholarships” that help families pay private-school tuition. You won’t find that one in the constitution. Some of that money is coming from revenues that might otherwise be directed to our public schools. If our lawmakers were truly interested in supporting public education, that’s where they’d be spending. But they’re not — special interests who’d prefer to dismantle public education in favor of privatization have captured too much legislative attention and too much taxpayer money. 

All this matters, because if we want to stay in the spotlight of the best states for economic development, we need to show the world a top-notch education system. We’ve got that in our network of public and private universities, but we’re falling far short in preparing our K-12 kids for the challenges of those technical jobs arriving here regularly. 

With a school system that ranks near the bottom quarter in public financial support, Cumberland County has a steep hill to climb if it wants to be competitive and attract more economic development. So far, we’ve failed.

But maybe the commissioners’ encouraging support of the schools will mark a turning point. Maybe there’s a growing realization that if we don’t foster our most important natural resource — our children — then we’ll continue to watch them move away to places where there’s real opportunity, not just the latest job in a warehouse or call center. 

Educational excellence is about more than money. But solid funding is the only foundation that will get us there.

Read CityView Magazine’s “The Back To School Issue” August 2025 e-edition here.